Earthlings Look for Signs in New Photos of Mars

Images Sent From Red Planet Launch Far-Reaching Hopes; Seeing a Parrot, an Elephant

By

Erica E. Phillips

Updated Aug. 21, 2012 10:19 a.m. ET

For more than two weeks, retired sculptor George J. Haas has been glued to his computer, watching as NASA's "Curiosity" rover returns its first photographs from the surface of Mars.

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Terrain on Mars said to resemble an elephant.
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Earthlings have long looked to the skies for familiar images and patterns. Now, with the rover on Mars, some sky-watchers hope they are close to solving the mystery of images like the famous parrot on Mars, Erica Phillips reports on the News Hub. Photo: NASA.

Mr. Haas and a small group of dedicated colleagues have pored over other images from the red planet for decades, looking for features that could have been created by intelligent beings.

Over the years, among other things, they have seen a face they describe as half-human, half-feline. And a parrot-shaped feature on a mound of rock with "17 points of anatomical correctness."

For millennia, human beings have looked to the heavens with questions scientific, existential and divine. Long before technology gave humankind close-up views of neighboring planets, ancient cultures saw animal and other forms in the placement of the stars and planets.

Now with the rover on Mars, some believe they are closer than ever to solving the mystery of what has been seen in the skies.

Mr. Haas has co-written two books comparing Mesoamerican folkloric imagery with the parrot formation and the face, concluding that whoever built the constructions on Mars probably also introduced ancient Mayan societies to their creation mythology.

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A parrot-shaped feature on a mound of rock on Mars.
NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

He and his colleagues have been criticized by some in mainstream academia for their research. But Mr. Haas holds his ground. "I know art when I see it," says Mr. Haas, a past president of the Sculptors Association of New Jersey. He knows it is a hard sell. "The American public, they may not be ready for the parrot," he says.

In addition to the ubiquitous man in the moon, many enduring legends around the world describe a rabbit or hare in the moon. The industrious rabbit's figure can be seen, some say, hunched over among the shady shapes created by the moon's craters.

"The toad, mouse, cat, lion, bear, fox, have each been seen in the moon, and been the subject of folklore stories," according to a 1902 article in the American Journal of Psychology by J.W. Slaughter.

The Encyclopedia of Religion entry for moon says that the inspiration for the "Jack and Jill" nursery rhyme may have come from the shapes of a boy and girl that some saw on the moon.

As space cameras have become increasingly capable of capturing high-resolution images beyond the moon's surface, the legends and lore, it seems, have only expanded.

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After a 1976 photo of the "face on Mars" gained popularity and provoked speculation that the mound was of artificial origin, NASA produced this 3-D image of the region. The image is a composite of two photos, one from June 2000 and the other from April 2001.
NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

In 1976, the Viking 1 Orbiter photographed a region of Mars called Cydonia, and some observers spotted what they said was the form of a human visage on the surface.

The "face on Mars" got so much attention that NASA directed a camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor—a spacecraft launched from Earth in November of 1996 that photographed Mars from space until 2006—to take more images of the region.

Horace W. Crater, a physics professor at the University of Tennessee Space Institute and current president of the Society for Planetary SETI Research, was among those who called on NASA to follow up. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

New Photos From Mars

A self-portrait of the Curiosity rover taken with its navigation camera and showing its deck, released Aug. 17. NASA/JPL-Caltech/AFP/Getty Images

360-Degree Panoramas

As a result of the general clamor over the face, Dr. Crater says, he and five colleagues met in 1997 with NASA in Washington, D.C.

"It was a very good meeting," Dr. Crater said. "We felt grateful they would meet with us."

NASA says later images captured of the Cydonia region of Mars clearly showed the face was "a natural geological formation"—not of artificial origin.

Nonetheless, the closer humans get, the more some see.

Last summer, an Italian visitor to the Google Mars website claimed to have spotted the face of India's independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. He posted a YouTube video highlighting his discovery.

Earlier this year, a camera aboard a spacecraft orbiting Mars captured what looked like an elephant's profile carved out by a lava flow, according to the website of NASA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE.

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Mars

Just weeks later, NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which orbits Mercury, beamed back a photo of what looked like Mickey Mouse's head on that planet's surface, according to photos posted online by the Lunar and Planetary Institute, a research institution that supports NASA's exploration programs.

"As humans, we see patterns in things," says Ari Espinoza, a spokesman for HiRISE.

Mr. Espinoza says his team uses the program's website to call attention to images like the elephant as a way to generate interest among the general public. He saw a rock formation in one photo recently that looked like a fleur-de-lis, the symbol used by the New Orleans Saints, he says.

Mr. Espinoza says he receives lots of emails and online comments from curious observers, but serious suggestions that the sightings are anything other than coincidence are rare. "Very few times will I have someone write and insist it's something more," Mr. Espinoza said.

Going to Mars

That hasn't stopped Mr. Haas and others from believing there is more to the images.

Wilmer Faust, another Mars enthusiast, was the first human to spot the parrot formation in 2002, according to a website about the parrot research project. But he wouldn't have seen anything had it not been for his pet parrot's wild squawking and "bobbing his head" at Mr. Faust's computer monitor while he was examining images from Mars, according to an introduction on the website.

Mr. Faust and Mr. Haas connected on an Internet discussion board, and they were soon working with three other Mars image aficionados, calling their efforts "Project Teardrop," after teardrop-shaped formations in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars. Mr. Faust died in 2005.

If the Curiosity rover does in fact come across evidence of life, says Michael A. Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, the administration would make a "big announcement" and the global scientific community would take months, if not years, to debate what the results mean.

"You would end up with your most renowned scientists being involved in the debate I'm sure," Dr. Meyer says.

Plenty of impatient Curiosity fans have created their own Photoshopped versions of those first, grainy photos. One picture depicts a dirty Starbucks cup, half buried in the red sand. Another shows Looney Tunes character Marvin the Martian peeking around the side of Curiosity's camera lens.

Mr. Haas dismisses such "silliness," saying it detracts from serious research into the images. "There's a lot of foolishness out there," he says.

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